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Madness, Resistance, and Representation in Contemporary British and Irish Theatre

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Madness, Resistance, and Representation in Contemporary British and Irish Theatre Madness, Resistance, and Representation in Contemporary British and Irish Theatre Submitted by Jonathan Edward Venn to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Drama, October 2016 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. (Signature) . 1 Mum. Dad. Lizzie. It runs in the family. 2 ABSTRACT This thesis questions how theatre can act as a site of resistance against the political structures of madness. It analyzes a variety of plays from the past 25 years of British and Irish theatre in order to discern what modes of resistance are possible, and the conceptual lines upon which they follow. It questions how these modes of resistance are imbibed in the representation of madness. It discerns what way these modes relate specifically to the theatrical, and what it is the theatrical specifically has to offer these conceptualizations. It achieves this through a close textual and performative analysis of the selected plays, interrogating these plays from various theoretical perspectives. It follows and explores different conceptualizations across both political and ethical lay lines, looking at what composes the theatrical practical critique, how theatre can alter and play with space, how theatre capacitate the act of witnessing, and the possibility of re-invigorating the ethical encounter through theatrical means. It achieves this through a critical engagement with thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. Engaging with the heterogeneity of madness, it covers a variety of madness’s different attributes and logics, including: the constitution and institutional structures of the contemporary asylum; the cultural idioms behind hallucination; the means by which suicide is apprehended and approached; how testimony of the mad person is interpreted and encountered. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would not have been possible without the luck and fortune to have two of the most generous supervisors: Anna Harpin and Jane Milling. My thanks to Anna for her patience in seeing me through the rough transformation of the first year. My thanks to Jane for making the past two years a continual intellectual joy, a wry fond way of calling me out when I was flailing, and always having another question. That I am here is because of both of you and your kindness. A research community is marked by a pedagogy that seeps through, without ever resorting to the patronizing. Too much of this thesis is the result, one way or another, of the intellectual generosity and kind conversations with Exeter University’s Drama Staff. My thanks, in particular, to Adrian Curtin, Kara Reilly, Jerri Daboo, Bryan Brown, Patrick Duggan, Sarah Goldingay, Rebecca Hillman, Kate Newey, Fiona Macbeth, Michael Pearce, and Konstantinos Thomaidis. And my thanks to JP and Trish, for putting up with my daftness, and replying to it with daftness in kind. My thanks to the AHRC and Exeter University as a whole, for the grant and opportunity to write this thesis. In addition, to the various voices and insights I encountered at TAPRA 2015, helping me consolidate and think through my ideas. Further on from this, thank you to a stupidly wonderful post-graduate drama community, that always replied to my incessant intellectual wrangling with an unsullied enthusiasm: Eda, Josiah, Bec, Becca, Aqeel, Kate, Kelly, Janine, Nora, Ev, Will, Rose. Beyond this, I have been terrifyingly fortunate in my friends in Exeter. To Fred and Angela, for a glass of wine in one hand, a gesticulating argument in the other. To Hannah, Anna, Tom, Simon, Will, Emily, Mike, Richard: you’ve all seen me through this. RJ, Mike, Johnny, Joe, Zac and all you idiots on the infamous thread. You were and are all a beautiful distraction. To Nick, for the call every day. To Pete, for twenty years of insufferable friendship. To Sharanya, for almost too much joy. To my family as whole, for arguments around the table, around the television, around just about anywhere, really. My love to Granny, Grandpa, Nana. We don’t talk enough about survival. I could not have survived without my family. It is in this spirit that this thesis is thoroughly and completely devoted to Mum, Dad, and Lizzie. 4 Finally, my sincere thanks to those deemed to be unfit, unwell, not quite right. To the short conversations, the fragmentary exchanges that have sustained my passion and respect, and to the brief expressions of solidarity, that I needed to earn, not to expect. 5 List of Contents Section Page Acknowledgements 4 Introduction Personal Development Towards Thesis 8 What is Madness 9 Madness, Performance, Research Questions 12 Literature Review and Conceptual Overview 14 Conceptual Structure of Thesis 31 Chapters I. Psychiatric Power, Realism, the Practical Critique and Representation of the Contemporary Asylum Introduction 39 Seeing Patriarchy and Seeing Madness in Sarah Daniels’ Head-Rot Holiday 48 Diagnosis through Language and Race in Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange 58 The Dispersed Mad Body in Lucy Prebble’s The Effect 71 Conclusion 84 II. Hearing Voices, Seeing Visions: Hallucination, Space, and Mad Experience Introduction 87 Uncertain Meanings and the Family in Ridiculusmus’ The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland 95 6 Away with the Fairies: Globalization, Madness and the Fairytale in Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker 107 Smoke in your Eyes: Spaces of Hallucination, Intersectionality, and Invisible Violence in debbie tucker green’s nut 120 Conclusion 131 III. Other Lives and Radical Perspectives: Witnessing the Suicide, Witnessing the Mad Introduction 135 Victim, Perpetrator, Bystander: Seeing the Witness in 4.48 Psychosis 147 What’s my Motivation? The Implications of Engagement in David Greig’s Fragile 158 It Didn’t Happen Like This: Lippy and the Crisis of Voice 169 Conclusion 183 IV. Madness and the Ethical Encounter in Autobiographical Performance Introduction 186 The Uncertain Hand in James Leadbitter’s Mental 195 Hearing Silence in Dylan Tighe’s RECORD 207 The Obscured Face of the Volunteer in Bryony Kimmings’ and Tim Grayburn’s Fake It ‘Til You Make It 218 Conclusion 230 Conclusion 233 Works Cited 241 7 INTRODUCTION Personal Development Towards Thesis This thesis provides an interrogation of the representational politics of madness and how theatre can act as a site of resistance. The genealogy of madness has long drawn upon structures of performance and performativity. Yet, within theatre and performance studies, there has been a comparative dearth of sustained engagement with the politics of madness. In particular, there has been little rigorous conceptual wrangling with what it means to resist through performance in the context of representations of madness. This thesis will attempt to remedy this lacuna. There is no easily identified path, or moment of revelation that conceived this project, or the work. Rather, it has been the slow sedimentary accumulation of the thoughts and gestures in the world around me, that has led to a fascination with the connection between performance and madness. Far from a Damascean revelation, it has been the observance of ugly trends and quiet violence in everyday life that has formed the intellectual anger that has sustained this work: the persistent assumption that madness is performed, that it is possible to read madness upon the body; the shock of the revelation of the mad person who has managed to ‘pass’ as normal, often followed by a weird form of congratulation; how those who decide to express their status as ‘mad’, through a combination of the voyeurism surrounding them and an insistent cultural logic, are forced into a foreign, confessional mode; a slow accumulation of political awareness, around psychiatric survivors, around practices of sectioning, around enforced treatment. Whilst there is no originating moment, the structure of this thesis can be threaded alongside my own history in academia. My joint honours BA in Politics and Philosophy at Cardiff University prompted the intellectual curiosities that would mature in this thesis. My studies in philosophy ventured across literary theory, philosophical apprehensions of language and discourse, marking out hermeneutics circles, across thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and Hans-Georg Gadamer. In politics, I returned to the contradictions embedded in sovereignty, its relationship to constitutional structures, constructions of agency, the theory of 8 international relations. Between these two disciplines, a sustained interest emerged, in how structures of language inform political codifications of agency and, in parallel, how political operations of power preclude possibilities of language and exercise power through the practice of definition. Beginning to think through theory and its implications, my MA at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama shifted this to an appreciation of how aesthetics – specifically drama - can interplay with conceptions of language, sovereignty and agency. As I studied Writing for Stage and Broadcast Media, I was encouraged by my tutor, Tony Fisher, to apply my knowledge of philosophical and political discourse to dramatic structure. In both my own work, and in analysis of playwrights such as Simon Stephens, Caryl Churchill and David Mamet, I appreciated drama as a potential bridge between my concerns of language and sovereignty. This development, from philosophy and politics to writing for stage, is what has capacitated this thesis. It draws upon a range of conceptual work, and interrogates them, in order to analyze how certain theories can help us illuminate the processes at play in certain performances. This work rarely involved an explicit engagement with madness. But in retrospect, madness constantly reoccurs, incessantly in the background.
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